Health care reform President Obama used the “bully pulpit” of last night’s press conference ( transcript here) to push harder on health care reform. He denounced insurance companies, saying “”Right now, at the time when everybody’s getting hammered, they’re making record profits and premiums are going up,” and said that much of the cost of the health care reform package will be paid by saving “over one hundred billion dollars in unwarranted subsidies that go to insurance companies as part of Medicare.”
Locally, UnitedHealth reported a 155 percent increase in profits for the quarter ended June 30, reported the Star Tribune, which noted that “Insurers such as UnitedHealth oppose the so-called public option, a government-run alternative to private insurance.” [corrected URL and number 10:15 a.m.]

Obama said that the costs of the present system are higher than the costs of reform:

If somebody told you that there is a plan out there that is guaranteed to double your health-care costs over the next 10 years, that’s guaranteed to result in more Americans losing their health care, and that is by far the biggest contributor to our federal deficit, I think most people would be opposed to that. Well, that’s the status quo. That’s what we have right now. So if we don’t change, we can’t expect a different result.

MN pushes Medicare reform What can get Michelle Bachmann and Al Franken on the same page? Every single member of the MN delegation has agreed on a plea for changes to the Medicare reimbursement formula. The current formula gives Minnesota lower reimbursement rates because of the state’s higher efficiency in delivering health care, according to the letter sent to President Obama by the Congressional delegation. MPR reports:

“We need to bring down the cost of health care, and the only way you do that is to put a formula in place which rewards good outcomes and doesn’t award inefficiency,” DFL U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum said in an interview this afternoon on Minnesota Public Radio News.

Beautifying garbage Should Hennepin County shovel 21 percent more garbage into the downtown Minneapolis burner? That’s the question before a city council committee on Thursday morning, reports the TC Daily Planet., with debate centering on both health and environmental concerns. But wait — Hennepin County commissioners are talking about beauty, not burning, according to MinnPost, disagreeing over the appropriateness of a planned “$2 million makeover, with around $700,000 of that going toward landscaping for the facility.”

World/National News

Obama on race and Gates arrest TPM paraphrases: “If I tried to break into the White House, I’d get shot”

Obama: “The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof they were in their own home. … Race remains a factor in the society.”

Honduras crisis continues Despite international backing from the U.N., the OAS, and governments around the world, including the United States, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya has been unable to return to his country after a June 28 military coup. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, himself a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been negotiating for Zelaya’s return, and now says he should return on Friday. BBC reports that Arias has put forward a plan with limits on presidential power, and that the country’s interim authorities have rejected the plan but also said they would allow the Honduran Congress to vote on it.

There is currently a curfew in place across the country, military roadblocks in various regions, and arrest warrants filed against leaders of unions and campesino, indigenous, and human rights movements. Security forces have killed at least three people. Social movements continue to rally in the streets and their numbers and degree of organization have increased daily as they fight for the return of President Zelaya and his right to consult the public on a constitutional assembly. It was this issue that sparked the coup, implemented by the armed forces, and conservative politicians and businessmen.

Both the European Union and the United States have suspended aid to Honduras, according to Democracy Now, but the United States continues to train Honduran military at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, known as WHINSEC, formerly known as the School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia. Six of the officers involved in the coup, including its leader, General Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez, were trained at the School of the Americas.

South African protests, violence More than 100 people arrested, police firing rubber bullets at demonstrators, and looting of foreign-owned businesses are reported by BBC, as protests and violence spread in townships of Johannesburg, the Western Cape and the north-eastern region of Mpumalanga. With the country in the grip of a recession:

Fifteen years after the ANC won its first election, more than one million South Africans still live in shacks, many without access to electricity or running water.

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Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provides health care for 9 million children and 375,000 pregnant women in working families who make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough for private insurance. Working families like Bob Cratchit’s family. You remember Bob Cratchit. He worked for old Ebenezer Scrooge, and he didn’t make much […]

Old Scrooge, before he repented, thought the poor and disabled might as well die and reduce the surplus population. He would have loved this tax bill, which is likely to reduce the surplus population by, among other things, reducing access to chemotherapy for Medicare patients with cancer. The tax bill also eliminates tax deductions for […]

If you are confused about the “tax cut” bill, you are not alone. I took two semesters of tax law way back in the day, and I do my own taxes every year, so here’s my explanation of just one of the ways the “tax reform” cuts taxes but actually leaves you paying more.

Want to open the faucet and see brown, gritty, unsafe water? Move to St. Joseph, Louisiana, where the town’s water system is irreparably fouled by decades of neglect. The impoverished town is not alone, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting: “St. Joseph, population 1,029, is one of thousands of small towns across the country […]

UPDATE WITH CORRECTION 10/6/17 – see below: Yom Kippur is a day of fasting and repentance. It is a day to reflect on what we have done wrong in the past year, and to ask forgiveness. Unless you are the president of the United States. Then it is a day to attack anyone who dares […]